while I've backed "Wildman" and was sorry it didn't happen. But I've discoverd an new Kickstarter-Campaign from Guido Henklel.
He was the producer of "Planescape: Torment" and designed the "Realms of Arkanie"-Series (Das Schwarze Auge),

"Deathfire: Ruins of Nethermore" will be a single-player party-based fantasy role-playing game that will combine deep characters and solid storytelling with turn-based combat.

Hi guys, there is other amazing Kickstarter going on right now, it's an unique space game.
For instance you will be able to build/customize you own spaceships for parts of other spaceships you destroy during the game. How cool is that!

This Kickstarter is a real bargain. You get:
- A cross-platform game. Yes, you don't have to pick your version, you can have all 3 (PC, MAC and Linux). It's true in some Kickstarters you must choose only 1!
- A high quality original soundtrack. This could be from a movie and hopeful some day it will.
- For Linux users this is the chance to have a AAA game that we can play.
- If you are willing to commit yourself in this journey, you will have the option to be entitled to "Expansion Packs and Future Content FREE FOREVER". It's not explicit in this kickstarter, but it includes the current 2 books of the Skyjacker saga, although they still need to be translated to English in the future.

Well, Gas Powered Games got bought by Wargaming.net. I do not think they are free to pursue their own projects like this anymore. With that said, 500k was a very respectable run for a game that was NOT a nostalgia trip, though. I thought Wildman looked like it had a lot of promise, and I'm sad to see it not funded. :(

Hey guys, Neal Hallford here. The writer on what would have been the Wildman project. Just in the smallest off chance there are still any people following this thread, wanted to let you know that I've Kickstarted a new fantasy novel to take the place of the novel I was to write for Wildman. Hope you'll come by and check it out:

@ MikeHumphreys if Chris Taylor was smart about this then he would not have listed Project Mercury. as a company asset. If thats the case he can work on it at his leisure. I admit I have some misgivings about the acquisition based on war gaming.nets portfolio and track record . All we know for certain is it's allowed the team to stay in the fight, We need more information and i'm sure we will get it eventualy.

I hope that Chris Taylor will post an update about the buyout and what it means for GPG and its projects.

@Daryl Putman, I'll give Wargaming the benefit of the doubt. Its roots are in classic strategy, games such as Galactic Assault and Order of War, so I can't imagine they're totally against such games. Also, I suspect that your "F2P POS" comment doesn't come out of any actual familiarity with Wargaming's games, just your general hatred of the idea. Millions of World of Tanks players would be to differ, I'm sure.

Chris mentioned they had already been considering some manner of FTP, but that was never the full intended purpose. You gotta remember the full game was expected to be 20-40 hrs long for $20. That's a lot of content for really cheap. They'd need to sell a bucket load at that price to pay for the 3-4 yrs of total time they spent on the game before funds ran out.

I'm sorry to see that Wildman will likely never see the light of day (or at least as seen in the KS project). Wargaming.net's purchase of GPG spells disaster for it. It'll be morphed into some online only microtransaction F2P POS.

GPG just got bought by Wargaming - let's hope Wildman is back on the cards.

Looks like Taylor was very honest about the closure of this funding stream - it was due to end today I think, albeit far short of the target but now we can but hope Wargaming funds the completion of Wildman or whatever else they had in the pipeline.

Games like Minecraft are one in a million. Sure, Steam is helping people make more money than they normally would off indie games (my friend recently quit his job off the Steam sales from his FIRST game), but hits for first-time games are really rare.

30k is way too high for a no-name company. You also can't just assign a random number. For instance, my company's first game is set to come out in a few months, and for (what we assume will be) a $2.99 title with maybe five hours of gameplay, it cost us a total of $3k. My friend's game was set at $600, but he already had 95% done already. We have put our Game #2 at - speculating here of course - $10k for animation, sprites, art, minimal voice, and for that we do hope to use Kickstarter.

One of the HUGE mistakes I've seen 99$ of all campaigns do (including this one) is not take fees into consideration.

As for $1 million or over, nobody is going to give that much money to an indie company without the game being short of EFFING AMAZING. I can see the average for a KS Game becoming $1m in maybe ten months - IF the current crop of gamestarters slated to hit this year are successful.

Seriously, though, a successful Kickstarter campaign takes months to cement before you should even think about creating the page. If you are not careful, or not running it like a Political Campaign, you will find yourself like Stardock: you completed your goal but you are $50k in debt because you had no idea what money meant.

Sean,
Paragraphs please, its just too hard to read as one huge blob. I got through it and you made a few good points but they were hard to pickout.

I have learned a lot watching this Kickstarter. A big game industry name does not always make a kickstarter successful.

Do you think it is possible for a truely independant game company to maybe build a reputation by making a small kickstarter ~30k and show they can fullfill the promises. Then do another kickstarter to raise an amount to make an A or AA game ~1m?

I have a few thoughts on this. First of all, the kickstarter had almost a 0% chance of success, until the mass layoffs. The majority of us came in after that time, some, like myself, still anticipating failure. Also, folks point to the $0.5 million kickstarter as evidence that the game would not do very well with a traditional funding model. For one, most people that would buy a game won't use kickstarter. How many people who play FTL realize it was a big winfall Kickstarter project? I'm guessing the majority don't, as that game is huge and the majority of KS backers probably don't play steam, as they have glorious DRM free versions. No, kickstarter is a decidedly niche audience, and that audience won't really be buying into products like HAUNTS again anytime soon. There were even full blown scams, like Zion Eyez, that jaded a large percent of the design category backer base, where the truly big tickets are. Kickstarter just ain't what it used to be for the majority of the users that came in during the feel good DFA winfall glory days. There are still big winners, usually with ridiculous soon-to-be unfulfilled promises like the Ouya and Oculus Rift but GPG was a decidedly more clandestine effort, which was at odds slightly with the big ticket price. Then the layoffs hit and it turned almost instantly into a can-they-save-it Republique style funding approach, at which point I signed on to watch the ensuing madness. I was not disappointed, and the situation turned out far better than I expected. The game may well see release, I think it's likely that it won't, but the engine in development may be re-purposed to another game. Wildman didn't hype very well in the few days prior to the clusterfuck, but I don't think there was anything specifically wrong with it. Maybe the artwork, I think it was a bit off-putting, which was the same thing that I felt hurt Hero-U in the beginning, which has an otherwise awesome premise on which it limped to success. These little things matter a lot nowadays, because, like myself, most people are extremely jaded toward kickstarter. With the brand recognition, it's probably far better to go the Robert's Space Program route and just raise money on your website. That can also backfire, see: sketchy blackisle studios crowdfund effort http://gamasutra.com/view/news/183960/Opinion_Black_Isle_is_a_great_case_study_in_how_to_NOT_crowdfund_your_game.phpHowever, I think GPG had more good impressions than bad. You also don't lose 15% (5% to KS, 5% to Amazon, and 5% to fuckwits who can't pony up the money when the time comes) of the haul, so there's that. I don't think the goal was to successfully crowdfund, unless the move was out of desperation, because there's a general lack of knowledge about modern crowdfunding that permeated throughout this project. I believe that it was known by GPG that it was doomed the second the project hit the internet with a thud, but that was never really the point. The point was free media, and a remote possibility of free winfall (and suddenly an operating budget once again). In that regard, what a resounding success, getting picked up by Wargaming. I'm not a fan of the F2P, but the studio seems to have a serious interest in console development, so odds are GPG will get to continue to release high quality product. I never really cared about Wildman, GPG was my interest, I think most KS backers felt that way. Hey, I may never play a new game by GPG again, since they're now part of an F2P company's toolchain, but at least they get to keep producing content. Seeing as how THQ just went up in a ball of flame and killed a studio along with it, that's not a bad outcome. Wargaming is also on the cutting edge of this, as I call it, "Valve hats" funding model, so they're likely to do very well in the future, since that's where the money is. However depressing it may be for me to see the already-beleaguered-by-horrible-decisions old guard give way for this "Valve hats" nonsense, I can't begrudge it, since I'll always have old product, with all its depth, structure, difficultly, complexity, storytelling, and kickstarters like these that try to make games like the old product. Also, the modern games made by the old guard have sucked, and continue to suck, and I don't think things like F2P, WoW, and CoD:BO ruined the respective old models so much as the old guard did this to themselves with DRM, licensing, sequelitis. And if KS was supposed to be the new model for getting good product released, it fucking blew it too. At least a few likely to be good products got in during the winfall, but man did KS blow that fast... It's gonna be even worse when the Oculus Rift wreaks its impending havoc on the already troubled ecosystem.

This some news at least. Can't really say if it's positive until we know how GPG will function as a subsidiary of Wargaming or what they will be working on. The parent company's name is quite apt when relating to GPG's history as one of the premier RTS developers. They've done turn based games before, I believe, before they hit F2P gold, perhaps they want an arm of the company producing major RTS games.

I REALLY Dont know what to think...i play WoT and really enjoy it but please...chris...tell me GPG will remain it's own studio and this only means your getting the required "funds" to continue with Wildman? pweeeease?

Not sure how I feel about this new acquisition. I am rarely interested in F2P games and honestly the ones I have been interested in have not taken much of my time. I hope Chris can pump out some retail full content games with single player. F2P games are horrible.